AMD Radeon R9 280X Video Card Review w/ ASUS, XFX and MSI

AMD Radeon R9 280X GPU Overclocking

A video card review isn’t complete without some overclocking, so we’ll be taking a look at overclocking each of the three AMD Radeon R9 280X video cards. To overclock we used a 3rd party overclocking utility to adjust the the power control settings to +20% and to raise the GPU and memory clock settings as high as possible. We left the fan control on auto and did not adjust the voltages on the card. It should be noted that the the XFX Radeon R9 280X Double D has a voltage that can not be adjusted, so it is set at 1.2V no matter what. The MSI and ASUS cards have voltages that can be adjusted higher and thus further overclocks are highly likely.

First up we have the XFX Radeon R9 280X Double D! We were able to take this card from 1000MHz to 1095MHz on the core and the memory from 1500MHz to 1800MHz. When running at 1095MHz core and 7200MHz effective memory we were able to run 3DMark Fire Strike at 7852 3DMarks, which is a big jump up from the stock run of 7165 3DMarks!

The MSI Radeon R9 280X was able to reach 1110MHz core and 1615MHz memory (6460MHz) before things would get unstable. This core clock helps it reach 7883 3DMarks in Fire Strike and made it a tad faster than the XFX Radeon R9 280X Double D card.

The best overclocker of the bunch was the ASUS Radeon R9 280X Top as we were able to hit 1165MHz on the core and 1770MHz on the memory (7080MHz effective). This very nice overclock was enough to turn in a score of 8319 in 3DMark FireStrike!

The AMD Radeon R9 280X series appears to be easy to overclock and we were able to get noticeable performance gains by doing so.

theres definately issues with these cards. Many say the memory clocks are to high

Christofer Santiago

Kind of stupid to put cards far out of its price range and on top of that Nvidia SLI numbers? They had the cards and could of easily did crossfire bench marks as well, especially being that they were the cards being highlighted. And btw did they disable PhysX to be fair to AMD? A’la TressFX.

Lianesch

MSI Radeon R9 280X Gaming Temperature:

VDDC set to min, not max

Nathan Kirsch

sorry about that!

Yosef

I am dissapoint by your lack of 3-fan Gigagbyte Windforce Master Race

Will-0-Wisp

The MSI R9 280X is definitely the one I’ll get!!! Thanx for the review!

Mombasa69

No Crossfire testing then?

Gogu

No.

michael centeno

this is pro nvidia campaign here buddy.

KC

Crossfire works nicely. Moreover this was crossfire tested with 7970 Ghz and it works perfectly. No issues. Its a beautiful card for very low price

Mombasa69

Sapphire R9 280X Toxic, best of the lot easily.

lolol

If you want a burnt-through GPU,yes.
I’ve spoken to 2 Computer-Shop owners who build custom PCs for their customers.
I visited them to get reliable infomation about high quality hardware. Sapphire, HIS and Powercolor have a failing rate of more than 20%.
Asus, XFX, MSI are the only reliable ones.
They install Gigabyte only if the customer insists to use a Gigabyte model.
Asus oder XFX models are standard.
I was surprised when they said XFX. Only heard bad things about it. But their numbers don’t lie.
They have to take care of their reputation. They would bullshit themselves if they talked crap.